by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

When I saw Transport for London advertising for a “biodiversity officer” my first thought was that it was a particularly loopy idea of mayor Ken Livingstone’s.

But evidently not: it seems that under the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 – which puts the European biodiversity provisions into British law – all public bodies will in future have to appoint a biodiversity officer and seek his approval for every action they take.
 
“The aim is to raise the profile of biodiversity in England and Wales eventually to a point where biodiversity issues become second nature to everyone making decisions in the public sector,” says the bumf produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

That is all well and good, then.

Having failed miserably to eradicate the scourge of MRSA in its hospitals, we can now look forward to the NHS proudly announcing it has secured the conservation of the flesh-eating bug in accordance with the European biodiversity directive – and that it will be there for future generations to enjoy, too.

No-one should fool themselves into thinking the implications of this legislation will stop at the public sector.

Elsewhere in Europe, biodiversity laws already have many achievements to their name: the construction of a business park at Aachen, Germany, was halted because of the supposed presence of the black-bellied European hamster.

No one, it turned out, had actually seen any hamsters on the site since 1945, but that didn’t seem to matter. The developers couldn’t prove that the animal had been extinct for many years, so it was presumed still to exist.

It was again elusive hamsters that held up car manufacturer DaimlerChrysler’s plans to build a used car centre in Saxony.

When naturalists failed to spot the animals, the authorities sent in a team equipped with GPS equipment to map out what it argued were hamster burrows. Talk about a sense of proportion.

Of course conservation is important, and no developer should be allowed to send in the bulldozers without consideration to flora and fauna. But the rules inspired by biodiversity legislation have become bizarre – and contradictory.

One Scottish landowner recently thought he was doing the environment a favour by reintroducing the dormouse to the grounds of his Argyll home.

The animals had been prevalent in the area until being driven out by intensive farming. Just before he released the animals, however, he rang Scottish Natural Heritage – the quango charged with looking after wildlife north of the border – to ask whether it had any advice.

The result? He was immediately threatened with jail on the basis that the dormice might somehow upset a delicate ecosystem.

In Wales, a farmer was threatened with jail for the opposite reason: he drove a tractor through a field believed to be home to dormice. In the Alice in Wonderland world of environmental legislation, you are damned if you encourage dormice, and damned if you do not.

DEFRA says it will produce comprehensive guidance on what biodiversity means for public agencies – and for any business which comes into contact with them. But it isn’t hard to envisage what will happen.

The concept of biodiversity is so vague that, just like probation officers freeing dangerous criminals for fear of contravening their human rights, over-zealous biodiversity officers will see it as their job to prevent any economic activity which could possibly interfere with an unusual species.

Given that virtually any species, such as the dormouse, can be either a valuable species in its own right or a threat to other valuable life forms, it will be impossible to do the right thing. Thirty years ago the World Health Organisation celebrated the extinction of smallpox; now there are scientists who argue for its preservation on the grounds of biodiversity.

Ultimately, of course, the concept of biodiversity was not invented to help hamsters and dormice. It was conceived to look after a very different sort of beast: public sector workers. They’re absolutely thriving.